Part 3, Note 36

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"1840--Daily Journal--1846 of the Late Rt. Rev. J. M. Odin," Southern Messenger, June 15, 1893; Baptismal Records of St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, Houston, 1841-1860, Records No. 12, 39-52; Jean Gross and Anders Saustrup, trans. and ed., "From Coblenz to Colorado County, 1843-1844: Early Leyendecker Letters to the Old Country," Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, vol. 1, no. 6, August 1990, p. 188; Colorado County Deed Records, Book G, p. 9. In late December 1843 or early January 1844, a ship carrying 129 German immigrants, 124 of whom were Catholic, arrived in Galveston. The newly arrived Catholics immediately arranged to celebrate their arrival with a Mass, then went west to look for land. Probably, many of these apparently devout Catholics ended up in the Cummins Creek settlement and provided the stimulus for the development of the Catholic congregation there. Supporting such an assertion are the facts that in March 1844, two months after the settlers left Galveston, Father Ogé made a trip to Cummins Creek, and two months after that, a church was being built (see Letter of Jean Marie Odin to Jean-Baptiste Étienne, January 12, 1844, Episcopal Collection, Papers of Jean Marie Odin, Catholic Archives of Texas; "1840--Daily Journal--1846 of the Late Rt. Rev. J. M. Odin," Southern Messenger, June 29, 1893).
    The fact that the Germans practiced Catholicism further isolated them from the Anglo community. An anti-Catholic fever was rising in the United States in the 1830s. The feeling was fuelled by Maria Monk's 1836 bestselling book Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, which told how, as a Roman Catholic nun at the awful Montreal nunnery, she had been compelled to participate in the routine lecherous behavior of nuns and priests in secret underground chambers. Monk, who appeared in New York in the company of a zealous Protestant preacher, coyly accepted the sympathy and adulation of the community for the ordeal she told everyone she had survived. Her celebrity was only slightly tarnished by the revelation that she had never been in the convent, but had in fact been a prostitute. Monk's theme, of secret hypocrisies within the Catholic church, meshed nicely with that of the famous preacher Lyman Beecher, whose 1835 book, A Plea for the West, told of secret Catholic conspiracies to take over the democratic governments of the United States. These books were but two of the numerous publications which devoted themselves to combatting what they called Popery.